Thesis

2. LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1. THE THEORY OF STRESS
According to Dantzer (2001) significant attention has been paid to the relationship of
emotions to health. Generally, positive emotions have been connected to positive health
outcomes and negative emotions have been connected to negative health outcomes. A great
amount of research has been and is being dedicated to the connection between physical health
and a person’s mental state.
Which role psychological factors play in illness can be dated back to the 20 th century and the
works of Walter Cannon (Cannon, 1932, in Dantzer, 2001) and Hans Selye (Selye, 1936, in
Selye, 1976; Selye, 1937). It was the work of Cannon and Selye, and their experiments with
animal’s physiological reactions to stress, which has given the world the terminology of
“stress”. The physiological studies performed by Selye and Cannon are of great importance,
since these studies were the first of its kinds to show that an emotion or mental state is an
experience which should not only be connected to the psychological field but that emotions
also have an affect on the body which might give changes in the body itself. This then lead
researchers to propose that physiological responses associated with emotions are mediator
mechanisms in the way that unsettled conflicts have a direct affect on the health. Researchers
in the area of psychosomatics got the biological answer they had been looking for, in a chain
of biological explanations, which said that: psychological distress gives a continual
neuroendocrine activation, which gives changes in specific organs, which gives changes in the
body, and in the end which leads to a certain pathology. Selye’s and Cannon’s research had
investigated the glands in our body and looked at which hormones these glands secrete.
However, now we know that the brain is not just a passive border between our environment
and our inner selves, and today’s research has shown how emotions are evoked, and which
areas of the brain and which neurotransmitters are responsible for the stress response
(Dantzer, 2001).
Selye talked and wrote to a high degree about which role emotions play in the stress response
and the importance of stress to problems in our lives, however he was not a psychologist and
he did not conduct any research in this area. In the 1960’s and the 1970’s the stress